we like punishment in social justice land (lots people, in many societies and subcultures, like punishment). of course we do. it feels good to see someone who has hurt you receive a painful consequence for their actions, and we get that feeling by proxy when we see someone who has hurt someone else get punished. i don’t think that’s wrong in and of itself. i have lots of revenge fantasies, and they are very, very comforting to me at certain times. the problem is the enactment of punishment and revenge (and no, i don’t really see a meaningful distinction between punishment and revenge, though that is of course up for debate): as we know, pain and violence tend to replicate themselves, like a virus. punishment does not end violence; on the contrary, it breeds it.

[CN: sexual assault]

While most sexual assault conversations focus on prevention in the work place or on college campuses, we need to tackle this much earlier on. We need to start laying the foundation for understanding these issues as early as kindergarten.

Young people need to learn about concepts including: respecting boundaries; asking before touching; and who to turn to if they feel uncomfortable. And these lessons need to be taught in effective, age- and developmentally appropriate ways.

The first time a person receives a lesson about consent or sexual assault should not be during their freshman orientation at college. Because that is far too late. Not only are these complex issues best taught and learned over time, but they affect people of all ages — including children.

1. It likely won’t be different this time, and this is not your fault. Diets fail because they do not work sustainably over time. You may be thinking that you aren’t going to diet (I’m just  going to watch what I eat and be healthy) but if weight loss is the goal you seek, you will likely approach change with a dieting mindset. This mindset, by design, gives rise to perfectionism and promotes superhuman expectations. Participating in dieting culture supports the illusion that weight loss leads to happiness and health. Honestly, for most people, weight loss just tends to lead to more worry about weight re-gain.

Art3mis is the type of female character that pays lip service to women as gamers or women as serious members of online communities instead of truly representing them. When internet and gamer intersect, women are erased and their very existence in these spaces is questioned. I can’t help but think of recent events of online harassment toward women in game development and game criticism and game play. Women who have opinions and complex experiences. Women who demand to be heard instead of forced into the realm of eye-candy or sheer non-existence. As a character, Art3mis is a disservice to these women because she lacks a narrative that illustrates what she deals with as an OASIS, gaming celebrity. What struggles did she encounter in a predominately male cyber space that either sexualizes her or questions if she is a woman at all? I know what this character should be and I am angry that she is nothing more than the fantasy gamer girl who got to where she is without complaining or calling out the oppressive culture around her.

Ultimately, the controversy at Noble points to bigger concerns about whether school discipline systems and dress codes are really helping students learn — or subjecting them to shame and stigma. And it’s a reminder that students need access to menstrual products and clean clothes in order to be equal participants at school.

“If you’re constantly worried about staining your pants,” Segura said, “your brain isn’t focusing on what’s being taught in class. Instead, your brain is focused on this worry that you have.”

Amazon brags that when a child says, “Alexa, I’m bored,” Echo Dot Kids will respond with a game or activity. This feels like a win for parents and kids: A child is entertained, and her caregiver can attend to other tasks. But boredom, unfun as it feels, is crucial to healthy development. By finding something to do on their own, kids learn to think creatively and tolerate mild discomfort. According to pediatrician and media researcher Dr. Jenny Radesky, “These two skills—creative initiative and distress tolerance—are incredibly important in life success, but may become harder for children to develop if they become accustomed to immediate boredom relief through a virtual assistant or other device.”

More than that, the “play” offered by FreeTime Unlimited benefits Amazon’s corporate partners much more than it benefits children. Play is how kids learn about the world and their place in it, which is why the best play is open-ended and child-directed. But on FreeTime, play is driven by companies like Nickelodeon, which described Echo Dot Kids as “an exciting new arena for our audience to engage with our brand”—a troublesome thought when you remember that their audience is kids as young as 4 year olds and that “engagement” is brand-speak for “buying stuff.” This kind of branded play is more like interactive marketing, which limits children’s creativity and leads to a host of negative outcomes, including increased family stress (like the kind that happens when your child asks 20 times for that SpongeBob macaroni). A truly kid-safe product would give children the opportunity to play creatively, independently, and free of marketing messages.

We wouldn’t keep a child from learning to speak, or read, and then expect them to suddenly know how to do so as an adult. Why is it we think we can keep children from learning to take risks – from learning to overcome challenges – and that they’ll miraculously acquire the ability when they’ve grown taller?

The concept of queer time offers an alternative to the notion that one ought to discontinue particular practices or behaviors simply because one has “aged out” of them.

This core belief that loneliness and sexual dissatisfaction are a uniquely male proposition helps to justify the vitriol and occasional violence that men in this community unleash in the direction of women. And yet it’s a belief that’s entirely baseless.

Pinker is among many scholars who worry that intolerance on the right is being matched by a different kind of intolerance on the left. To be clear, reactionary centrists don’t deny that the hard right is bad and terrible. They see the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, the conspiracy theories, the voter suppression, the censorship of government researchers, the ICE agents picking people up off the street. But then they look for something, anything on the left to balance this out so they can stay in the middle.

This analysis lacks a sense of who actually has power on each side. Do we really think that a student activist group protesting a controversial speaker is as much of a threat to free speech as a Republican president who calls for jailing journalists and firing protesting NFL players? Of course not, but why then do Pinker and other scholars and pundits keep coming back to campus free speech debates as an example of lefty intolerance? Maybe their own positions in and around academia bias them toward caring more about these debates, but it may also speak to a deep need to perform a centrist balancing act that isn’t backed up by the facts.

And in some cases, reactionary centrists’ need for an intolerant left causes them to make stuff up or uncritically pass on obvious misinformation.